When comparing Messenger vs Gmail, the Slant community recommends Messenger for most people. In the question“What are the best Material Design apps?”Messenger is ranked 6th while Gmail is ranked 12th. The most important reason people chose Messenger is:

Pros

Pro

Uses Facebook friends to create a contacts list

Pro

Easy to share posts from Facebook

Integration with Facebook makes it easy to share any interesting posts from the Facebook timeline.

Pro

Read receipts

Can see who has seen each message in group messages.

Pro

Great UI

User interface of the application is clean, intuitive and easy to overview.

Pro

Best support for Gmail features

Since both the Gmail Android app and Gmail itself is made by Google, the app supports all features Gmail offers (like labeling/starring) and gets new features implemented early - usually as soon as they are announced.

Pro

Incredibly fast, advanced & predictive search

Gmail brings much of the functionality and power of Google's search engine to the app's search. You can use operators such as label:, is:, OR, has: among others, define date ranges, limit search to specific groups and so on. And, you can do it all amazingly fast. The search will also try to predict what you're trying to search for before you've even finished your query and offer up those results.

Pro

Comes bundled with Android for free

Not only is the application free, it comes bundled with the Android OS by default so you don't even have to bother downloading it.

Pro

Google Drive integration

The app allows inserting files from Drive straight to email or uploading attachments to Drive before sending them out. It will also notify if the person you're sending the file can open the file or if you should change the sharing settings for that file beforehand. Finally, you can choose which one of your Google accounts you want visible in the app.

Pro

Safely automatically displays images

The app does not require a confirmation to show images as Google now hosts the images on their own servers making it safe. You can still disable the automatic displaying of images in the settings if you wish.

Pro

Google Calendar integration

Pro

Tabs to automatically organize your e-mail

Each of the categories can be disabled and you can move your mail around from category to category or set your own rules which sender should be put in which category.

Pro

Threaded conversations

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Cons

Con

Lack of privacy

Messenger is owned by Facebook. Based on their privacy policy, this means that any information you provide (including messages sent) are used by Facebook to profile you and sell access to your data to advertisers.

Con

Lack of end-to-end encryption

Secret (end-to-end encrypted) chats are only supported in one-to-one messages, and are not enabled by default, and the encryption has not been verified independently.

Con

No video messages

Currently there is no way to send video messages using Messenger.

Con

Sorting mail by Unread is unintuitive

Nearly every other mail app has a clear way to sort mail by Unread. In Gmail app you can do that only by typing “label:unread” in the search field.

Con

Very limited HTML composing

Composing of HTML formatted mails is very limited. No inline images and only some basic text formatting options

Con

No intrinsic p2p encryption option

Con

Too heavy

It should be lightweight.

Con

Limited notification buttons

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